


Essays from The Bar Is Low

by WenchicusThoticus



Category: Original Work
Genre: Analysis, Children, Culture, Dark, Erotica, Essays, F/F, F/M, Feminism, Fiction, Futanari, Gay, Gen, Gender Roles, Good Writing, Guide, Heteronormativity, Incest, Internalized Misogyny, M/M, Marriage, Meta, Misogyny, Mpreg, Omegaverse, Pedophilia, Podcast, Porn, Rape, Rape Culture, Results, Sexism, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Violence, Smut, Teenagers, The Bar Is Low, Toxic Masculinity, Trans, Writing, Yaoi, a/b/o dynamics, gay men, media, queer, repost, survey, word choice
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2020-08-20 23:33:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20236204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WenchicusThoticus/pseuds/WenchicusThoticus
Summary: Some essays related to fandom that I adapted from my podcast.Chapter one: “Misogyny and The Fetishization of Queer Identities and Fanfiction." If you participate in fandom, then you probably have some awareness of how people obsess over queer relationships and often horribly misportray them. But why is that? What leads fanfiction writers and other content producers to fetishize gay identities, whether they know they’re doing it or not?Chapter two: "Porn and Reality." How does porn affect our perceptions of and actions in reality? And how do specific types of porn affect our reality? If you read porn about pedophilia, are you more or less likely to sexually abuse a child? If you consume porn about women being brutalized or raped, will that affect how you treat them in real life, and what does it say about your sexual desires and if you will act on them? Do incest shippers want to fuck their relatives? What’s the appeal of incest anyways?Chapter three: "Word Choice in Erotica." What words do people like to see used in smut? And what might those words have in common?Let's find out, because there are answers.





	1. Misogyny And The Fetishization of Queer Identities in Fanfiction

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this in February 2019, but Ao3 took it down probably because I said we should dox a user who happened to be a pedophile. (Which I still think we should do, but I don’t want this getting removed again. Oh well.) I decided to keep it down after learning that I had said some untrue things about the writer I used in my case study (which is not included in this essay, but still exists in the podcast), but seeing as I'm working on another essay, I thought I'd edit and repost it.
> 
> Disclaimer: Is everything in here completely 100% accurate? No. Did I have to make generalizations? Yes. I know that. I thought my identity as a queer woman would give me perspective from both groups that receive the most discussion here (straight women and gay men), but it’s still impossible to accurately represent both. This essay ended up being more about misogyny than queer identities, so if that’s going to be a problem for you, either proceed with caution or tap out right now.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you participate in fandom, then you probably have some awareness of how people obsess over queer relationships and often horribly misportray them. But why is that? What leads fanfiction writers and other content producers to fetishize gay identities, whether they know they’re doing it or not? Let’s find out, because there are answers.

SHIPPING AND FANDOM

If you’re involved in fandom at all, which I'm assuming you are because you're on this website, then you probably came here with some pre-existing knowledge of how its participants obsess over queer relationships and often horribly misportray them in fanfiction. I originally wrote this for a special episode of my podcast, The Bar Is Low, and now I’ve decided to post it in written form to help get my message out. My show normally isn’t this serious, but for once, I actually have something to say here that I believe to be worthwhile and relevant, whereas mostly TBIL is about roasting bad porn.

Shipping is the heart and soul of fanfiction. Sure, there are some fics belonging to the “gen” genre that involve no romance or sex, but the vast majority of fics will contain a pairing in some form or another. Maybe it’s in the background, or maybe it’s the main focus, but it will almost certainly be there.

Why do we love shipping so much? Well, the internet’s for porn, that’s sure part of it. We want to see or read about hot characters bangin’ because that gets us off. Shipping is also about wish fulfillment. Some people just want to have sex or be in a relationship with certain characters. Maybe they’ll pair the character they’re attracted to with an OC, who’s really just a (usually idealized) rendition of themselves.

There are other, less direct ways that people project themselves onto characters. Maybe you’re lonely, but thinking about two characters getting together makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, so you can vicariously experience love through them, and that assuages your loneliness. It can provide you with those romantic vibes that you may crave, and it helps you discover yourself too, in a way. You’re able to think about the type of relationship and the type of person you want to be involved with.

Though shipping can be intrusive and create unnecessary drama (in reference to real person shipping and shipping wars, respectively), it has its benefits. You can explore your own sexuality and be gay/bi/etc in a safer environment online. The internet is pretty great like that. A young confused queer person can find a community of people like them, and older individuals who already have it figured out for themselves and can act as mentors or guides. Here, people can learn to accept themselves by realizing that they’re not alone, they have support, and that they are valid (if you want to use Tumblr language to say it).

The exact same goes for kinks and fetishes, ironically enough, considering that a major theme of this essay/episode is how gay people aren’t your fetish. But in terms of finding a community online, there are plenty of parallels. Finding out that you’re into some weird shit isn’t always easy to come to terms with — running a show about porn for over a year has taught me things about myself that I never wanted to know — but online, it’s easy to realize that there are other people just like you, and that you’re not a freak.

Fandom is a great way to connect people, and of course, that’s just a big part of the internet. What do we want to do online? Find stuff that we like, fuel our obsessions, meet and become content creators, or just talk to people. (The internet is also shitty in this way, too, because this same things apply to nazis, pedophiles, and other breeds of human garbage, but that’s not where I’m going with this.) 

And a lot of fanfiction is just about fucking with canon. Here, we can put in the LGBT+ representation that isn’t actually in media, or if we think canon relationships or just straight up canon as a whole is stupid, we can be like “fuck you, I’m not happy with how this ended, so I’m going to write my own version.” Spite can really fuel creativity sometimes. Writing fanfiction tends to be seen as lazier and not as creative as writing original content with your own universe and characters, but that’s not always true. There’s some really creative fanfiction out there, just like how there’s super generic “original” content.

WHY WE SHIP GAY MEN

Now that we’ve established why fandom and shipping can be positive and why we like them, let’s get past the intro and into the meat of this essay. And we’re going to start by talking about gay men, because this is The Big One in fanfic. Full disclosure about myself — I am a queer woman, definitely not a gay man, so I’ll admit that I’m not the most qualified to talk about everything going on here. I’d like to get other perspectives from whoever’s reading this, especially pertaining to your identity in this context.

Most mainstream media lacks gay representation, and if it DOES have gay representation, a lot of the time that representation is unfavorable — portraying gays as dirty or villainous, stereotyping them, glamorizing unhealthy relationships, or killing them off. Most characters in any sort of media are male, and that’s why most ships are gay. 

It’s almost just as simple as that — but there is more. Female characters are rarer, and when present, they are often underdeveloped. Straight relationships, the only relationships we usually see, can feel forced due to a lack of chemistry and an actual personality on the woman’s part. Hence, we ship male characters who already have a strong bond.

This does bring to light a larger issue in society: men can’t have intimate friendships with other men without it being seen as gay. Toxic masculinity — the notion that it’s weak and effeminate for men to show any emotion or open up to others — is indirectly reflected in fanfiction because it’s an attitude that permeates our society. Men have this idea that’s gotten drilled into their heads that the only person with whom they can talk about their feelings is their romantic partner. Women, meanwhile, don’t have that expectation, so we can have intimate friendships and no one necessarily thinks that it makes us lesbians. We assume a lot of the time, (often wrongly) that guys are the same, and when we tell something personal to a male friend, too frequently we’ll find out that he thinks that because he listened to us talk about our problems, we owe him sex. He’s not used to the notion that sharing feelings is something that can happen between people who are “just friends.”

So this is fucked up in a few ways, first of all, guys, your girlfriend cannot be your only source of emotional support. She cannot be your therapist and she cannot “fix” you. She can be there for you as best she can, but seriously fellas, y’all can’t rely on one person to shoulder all your emotional baggage as well as their own.

Second, and I find it insane that this hasn’t happened to me because it’s happened to pretty much every other woman I know (I like to think that men are scared of me), she doesn’t owe you sex because you listened to her talk about her feelings. This self-entitled attitude has ruined tons and tons of friendships. It’s just a difference between how genders interact that both men and women aren’t fully aware of in how it applies to their own lives. She doesn’t want to fuck you. She just sees friendship as something as more personal than you do. Teach your sons, younger brothers, neighbors, etc, that it’s okay for men to express their feelings (well, in addition to just anger) and don’t force gendered expectations on them. Especially when they’re too young to even understand what gender is.

How does this all apply to fanfiction? Most characters are male. That’s a lot of it. But if two of these male characters have a close friendship and express any sort of affection for each other, we think they’re gay because men aren’t allowed to show their feelings. On some level women know that male friendships are different because they’re the ones usually shipping slash pairings.

I think most of us are a little guilty of this, including myself. When I watched the Avatar episode about Fire Lord Sozin and Avatar Roku’s backstories (S3E6, “The Avatar And The Fire Lord”), the whole time I thought that they seemed really gay. Roku had a wife who he was clearly very attracted to when she showed up at all, but that’s not something I (or anyone else, really) would ship because the wife didn’t get much screentime or a personality. She’s not a character in her own right, she’s just the wife — defined by her relationship to a man. I didn’t even remember her name. Or if she had a name in the first place. (I looked it up for this episode. It’s Ta Min.) So why would I ship him and his wife when there’s a male character with whom he already has a strong bond? Their relationship is much more interesting, and it was the whole focus of the episode, after all.

That’s why we like to ship gay male pairings more than any others. Most characters are men, a good story develops character relationships, and when men have close relationships, everyone thinks that they must be gay.

GENDER ROLES

Before getting any deeper into this, we have to discuss what gay relationships are like compared to straight relationships. We’ve discussed the “why,” but we have to discuss “how” — how these relationships are portrayed and misportrayed and the “why of the how” — WHY are these relationships portrayed in the ways that they are?

I know that some rhetoric for getting bigots to accept gay and lesbian relationships as being okay is to say “oh, they’re just like us,” but that’s actually not true. Gay and lesbian relationships and straight relationships ARE different. Some gay/lesbian relationships DO have a dynamic similar to that of a straight one, and some straight relationships have dynamics similar to that of gay/lesbian relationships, but we’re going to focus on the traditional heterosexual relationship and the dynamic that has prevailed throughout history and continues to prevail in much of the world today.

You already know what I’m talking about. The man is the head of the household, goes out and works to earn money, provides for the family; the woman is subservient to her husband, stays at home to take care of the kids, or if she does have a job, she’s the one who has to sacrifice parts of her career to care for her children and keep the house in order. Her identity is more likely to be defined by relationships. For example (and these names are totally random), a man would say “My name is Sam, and I’m an accountant,” and a woman might say “I’m Jenna, Sam’s wife and Jacob’s mother.”

She isn’t important in her own right — like in the example I just gave about Roku’s wife whose name I didn’t even know. That’s how a lot of things are in media — think about some popular movies. Good chance that the main character is male. The women in the movie are unimportant to the plot, and they exist just for the men. Whether the character is the man’s mother or his love interest, she hasn’t got her own identity. Her identity IS that she belongs to the man in some way or another. And that’s how a lot of people still see women even in real life. There are strictly defined gender roles and expectations. The woman has one set of things she’s supposed to do, and the man has a different set of things he’s supposed to do. That’s been changing lately, but it still isn’t going to disappear any time soon. Men still get intimidated when a woman is smarter or makes more money than him, even if they’re dating said woman.

Men can also see marriage as the end of freedom. They’re stuck with one woman for the rest of their life unless they get divorced, have an affair, or their wife dies. Divorce was taboo for a long time, and that only started changing in the 70s. Having an affair is still frowned upon, and if you take things into your own hands regarding that last category, well, that’s straight up illegal. Jokes are made about the ball and chain that is marriage. Men complain about their wives and we’re supposed to say “Ohoho, that’s sure funny that he hates the supposed love of his life!” Straight culture is fighting with and hating your spouse. As a gay person looking in, that’s sure what it seems like.

So we’ve discussed gender roles in a relationship and attitudes towards marriage. What the hell does this feminist bullshit have to do with anything? 

Gay people don’t have those gender roles! There isn’t a long-standing, restrictive set of expectations and dynamics that society says we should follow like there is for straight people. A good, healthy relationship means that both people respect, trust, and listen to each other. By societal definition of male and female gender roles, a straight relationship is unequal and unhealthy. We can agree that a man is equal to a man, and a woman is equal to a woman, but we can’t agree that a woman is equal to a man. Misogyny is the root cause of the difference between gay/lesbian and straight relationships. Of course, queer relationships CAN be unequal, and they CAN be unhealthy, but they are not, by societal definition, expected to be that way.

In addition to all that, the LGBT community fought HARD for the right to marry, and in many parts of the world, is still fighting. Marriage is a privilege, not damnation. The expectation is for men to sleep around and for women to want commitment, two conflicting characteristics that aren’t set against each other in a gay/lesbian relationship like they are in a straight one. Straight people be like: “Hahaha, I’m getting married, soon I’ll have that ball and chain around my ankle getting nagged by the wife!” Gays, meanwhile: “Hahaha, I’m getting married, I’m thrilled to be able to express my lifelong affection and commitment to my partner in such an important way that so many members of my community were denied in the past!”

Anyway, lessons on marriage from a college kid. If you dread marriage, then don’t get married. It’s that simple. And if you can’t talk things through with your partner on the matter, or if you’re afraid to even bring it up, then you sure as fuck ain’t ready to get married any way you look at it. A high school teacher of mine liked to say that deciding to marry someone should be the easiest decision of your life, and I don’t know how true that is, but there’s definitely something to be taken from it, whether you agree with it or not.

MISPORTRAYALS

Anyways, that’s enough life lessons — let’s talk about porn! To quickly review what we’ve already established: most fanfiction is slash, another term for a gay male relationship, and most fic writers are women, especially straight women. 

They don’t understand all the shit we just talked about!!!

I don’t feel like I need to talk at length about why it’s women who tend to obsess over the relationships between fictional characters. We already know that romance novels/movies/etc are all marketed towards women for the same reasons that people like shipping: wish fulfillment. If a man likes the romance genre, we’re just going to call him a f*ggot because having feelings is gay. Since hets aren’t familiar with the lack of gender-based dynamics in a gay/lesbian relationship, they often treat it just like a straight one. Even if an author consciously knows that both of the characters they’re writing about are the same gender, they can default to heterosexual relationship dynamics. And yes, there are queer relationships with similar dynamics to straight ones, but that should not be your go-to. Dynamics vary from relationship to relationship; there is no one-size-fits-all, generic structure. 

Let’s use gay men as an example because that’s what straight women write about more. One of the men is, well, manly, and the other is delegated to the role of a woman. PSA: Just because a man is feminine, that doesn’t make him female. “Oh, gays have this thing where one tops and one bottoms, that’s basically equivalent to the dominant man and the submissive woman!” No, it isn’t. Out of tops, bottoms, and verses, most gay men are verses anyways, which means that they like both topping and bottoming.

If writing a same-gender relationship but one of the characters is transgender, straight people will write the trans character as whatever they were born as. Say that the pairing is cis male/trans male. The trans guy is almost certainly going to be treated like a woman. Trans men are often used for mpreg, which pretty much solidifies their role as the “female” one of the relationship. Futanari porn and omegaverse fanfiction are also super guilty of something similar, “if we put a dick on a woman then she’s suddenly a dominatrix!”

Other crimes of straight female fanfiction authors involve failing to treat gays like actual humans, just “commodities for you to flick ya bean to,” in the wise words of Nagisa from 50% Off (the parody of the Free! Iwatobi Swim Club anime). Gay fanfiction is written for and by straight women. They don’t care what’s accurate (such as needing lube for anal sex), and they don’t care what’s healthy — they just care about what’s sexy to them.

Let’s define fetishization, and it isn’t necessarily about literally having a fetish. Fetishizing something means that you obsess over it. For example, society fetishizes wealth. It doesn’t mean we want to fuck money or rich people (even though we all want that sugar daddy/momma, or that glucose guardian, if you want to use the gender-neutral term). It means we’re OBSESSED with wealth. What goes on with gay men and fanfiction is a lot like lesbians and porn in a broader sense. We don’t exist just so straight people can write about, film, and ultimately get off to us having sex. What a gay couple does in bed has NOTHING to do with a woman and her pleasure, and what a lesbian couple does in bed has NOTHING to do with a man and his pleasure. Jack shit. It’s intrusive and it gives people the wrong idea about us. If we’re trying to work towards equality and get people to understand us, stereotyping queer relationships as all the nasty and abusive things that (let’s be real) straight relationships usually are is just going to hurt our efforts. If you write/read/watch/otherwise consume or create yaoi, that doesn’t make you a gay rights activist or even supportive of the gay community at all. All that’s happened is now you have an idea in your head about how gay relationships should look, and you’re just reinforcing a stereotype.

Disturbingly common in fanfiction are abusive relationships and rape. What you’re supporting when you write something like this is the idea that we all love raping each other. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should stop writing rape porn, because rape porn’s going to be a thing no matter what I or anyone else says. If you pin the reason for the rape on the perversions of “the gays” — and whether that’s a notion you’re implying consciously or not — that’s hurting us. First of all, if a guy gets raped by another guy, it doesn’t mean he’s gay. It doesn’t even mean that the rapist is gay, because rape is about power, not sex. A real life rape is inexcusable, no questions asked, but a depiction of a fictional rape is still highly questionable, and that iffiness lies in the ideas you’re espousing or what you’re simply reflecting without knowing it. (It might sound like I’m saying that gay rape is bad because it makes us look bad. A reasonable reaction to this is “Someone got raped and THAT’S what bothers you?!” To reiterate myself, I’m talking about fictional rape. No real people are actually being physically/sexually harmed or coerced.)

INTERNALIZED MISOGYNY 

Of course, being queer means that you’re oppressed in some way or another, and when straight people misportray our relationships, they’re regurgitating harmful ideas about us. However, being a woman, even a straight woman, means that you’re oppressed too, and that feeds the obsession with males and male relationships. I have to admit that I overlooked this angle at first because I was initially approaching this topic more as a queer person than as a woman, even though sexism underlies so many other types of discrimination, namely homophobia. (For instance, society frowns upon effeminate men because it’s bad to be like a woman, and while a tomboy isn’t exactly approved of, she won’t be ostracized to the same degree as the former.)

You could blame misogyny for a lot of what’s going on here. Yes, there are the factors from the outside like the simple gender imbalance in media and a fundamental lack of understanding of gay/lesbian relationships, but what about internalized misogyny? Are we devaluing women as people not worth writing about? After all, we’ve been taught our whole lives that women are second class. And I don’t mean that someone just yelled “WOMEN SUCK” at us every day; it can be far more subtle than that, but the point is that it’s ingrained so deeply in our society that sometimes we don’t even notice it.

Here’s a quote from a thread on r/gendercritical on the subject: “Men fetishize lesbians for power, women fetishize gays to cope with lack of power.” 

Here’s another quote from the same thread: “There's no real existential threat to gay males from straight females. The motivations behind female fetishization of gay male sex and romance is still misogyny. But, I do think that there should be some space in this sub to carefully talk about the maladaptive ways that women cope with living under patriarchy. And idealizing male sex is definitely one of them.”

It’s gross and creepy, and it’s perpetuating stereotypes and negative ideas about queer people, but ultimately by doing this, women are harming and devaluing themselves more than anyone else. A straight woman might spend hours trying to pinpoint every moment of sexual tension between her OTP, she might send celebrities pornographic art or fanfic of them, and she might even yell at them to kiss each other if she happens to meet them. All of those things are wildly inappropriate, invasive, and obsessive, but on whole, there is no threat. A straight woman might express homophobia towards a gay man, or his mom might kick him out of the house for his sexuality, but men on whole don’t fear violence from women. 

Women can absolutely do really fucked up shit too. But again, I’m talking on whole. Men aren’t afraid of women just because they’re women — not unless they’re threatening their masculinity, and that’s nothing like the same type of fear I’m about to discuss. 

Women, on the other hand, have to be terrified of strange men just to survive, and this refers to all women — not just straight women, and not just lesbians. The threat of being killed or raped for rejecting a man is very real, just to name a single example. At my college, and I’m sure hundreds of other colleges too, it’s not uncommon for women to carry pepper spray on their key rings. If I saw a man with it, I’d assume that he was going to start trouble and I’d avoid him for fear of being assaulted, while I assume that women are buying it for self-defense.

So, you could definitely argue that gay men don’t even have much of a place being upset about this. Since when have women on whole posed a threat to any man? Yaoi fangirls are just demonstrating how much they hate themselves because of how society treats women. They’re the real victims. You could take that angle.

There are some parallels I could point out here to the Clark doll study that was used as evidence in the Brown v Board Of Education Supreme Court case in 1954, an experiment that was designed to test racial bias in children. Researchers had two different dolls, identical except that one was black and the other was white, and they asked the kids to pick the one they liked better. The white kids, unsurprisingly, tended to pick the white dolls, but so did the black kids! Because from birth society was telling them, “Hey, you’re inferior!”

As for the women who write about gay men? They’ve been told since birth, “Hey, you’re inferior!” Instead of choosing to write about other women, they prefer to write about men because society told them that women aren’t worth it. I’ve read a lot of fucked up fanfiction for my podcast, but there are really only two selections that I’ve found that are truly haunt-my-dreams-and-make-me-lose-all-faith-in-humanity levels of disturbing. Both are seriously upsetting fics, but in vastly different ways. One of them is (and forgive me for just dropping this on you) about four year olds getting raped by animals. The other one was written by a woman with a LOT of internalized misogyny to work through [note: this used to be my case study, but I removed it].

I find internalized misogyny really depressing. Someone told sexist women that they weren’t important because they happened to be born with vaginas, and they BELIEVED it, and now they’re suffering because they can’t recognize their own value as human beings. Same goes for anyone else who’s been conditioned to hate themselves for something they can’t control. (Pedophiles, however, can either get help or go fuck themselves. Just saying that there’s an exception. ) But whether it’s racism, homophobia, sexism, or something else, it’s sad when people are trained to hate and devalue themselves. 

So you could say that women ultimately fetishize gay relationships because of sexism in one form or another. They treat gay men like women, and in the process, fundamentally devalue themselves more than they do queer people. And it goes deeper than writing a nasty rape porno or something else of that nature. Because the time has come — let’s talk about mpreg.

MPREG

Mpreg is exactly what it sounds like: male pregnancy. This is just diving deeper down into applying characteristics of a straight relationship to a gay one. A lot of people hate mpreg, and the main reason cited is that it’s biologically and physically impossible. Lazy writers won’t explain the mechanics, but a higher quality fic will try to give some sort of explanation as to how it happened and how it works. But many people, myself included, have a visceral reaction of revulsion when it comes to mpreg, and I think there’s a conflicting muddle of conscious and subconscious beliefs that go into this.

There are a lot of reasons why people write mpreg, and domesticity is one of them. For people writing a slow-burn fanfiction, where is there left to go after they finally had sex? The natural progression might be to have a child. Like with shipping, writers may also be able to live vicariously through these fictional families they’ve built. Gender roles are more heavily adhered to because a dynamic involving mpreg reflects a heterosexual one; there’s one character who is very clearly “the woman” of the relationship. The often female writer does not know how a gay or even just a same sex relationship works — and that the end goal of a relationship isn’t always to have babies — and they write a straight romance disguised as a gay one.

However, another way to look at mpreg is that it challenges our conceptions of masculinity. Most mpreg fics pigeonhole the pregnant guy into a female role, and feminine = bad, right? But you can also use it as a way to say that men can still be nurturing and masculine at the same time — those traits are not mutually exclusive. Besides, it shouldn’t be insulting to be compared to a woman anyways. Similarly, there’s hetero mpreg, where a woman gets a man pregnant, and that opens up a whole new dynamic that I’m not even going to explore right now. It’s a lot to think about.

Strangely enough, there are men who enjoy mpreg. The logic here is that women have an amazing capability to nurture new life that men don’t and can’t have. Some men are enticed by this concept. It could be pretty cool to see a fic where an author uses mpreg as a tool to spur character development in a sexist man, and he understands the struggles of women and his own masculinity better in the end.

And speaking of what it could be interesting to see — people use mpreg as a creative avenue. There’s a lot you can do with this if you decide to fully explore it, and if written well, you can really explore and fuck with gender roles. Pregnancy is also DRAMATIC. Just two episodes ago on The Bar Is Low, I found a shorter fic where the plot revolved around the main character being pregnant. I normally don’t even like high school/modern AUs or pregnancy fic in general, but the drama was just so juicy that I ended up loving it. And involving a pregnant man would only add another dimension.

Worldbuilding is another area in which writers can show off their creativity in this genre. Is this a freak incident? Or can men just get pregnant in the universe of your fic? How are they treated and viewed by society? And how is mpreg really that different from a body swap AU, or something else impossible like vampires or werewolves? It’s fiction. You can do whatever you want, but people don’t have visceral reactions of disgust to interspecies sex between a vampire and a human, so why do we just recoil in horror at mpreg?

Of course, some people just have a straight up fetish for mpreg. So far we’ve mostly talked about gay men, but trans men have it rough in fanfiction too. A lot of people don’t bother with explanations as to how mpreg happens, but when they do, a common one is just that it’s a dude with a pussy. We already have women being treated just as sex objects and vessels for childbirth, but okay, let’s do it to this entire other population too. Besides, essentially what you’re saying when you write this is “Hey, trans guy, you’re the woman of the relationship,” which is awfully rude, I think.

The male equivalent of futanari seems to be a “cuntboy” or some variation of the term. A futa is just a woman with a penis slapped on, the same way a “cuntboy” is a man with a vagina and probably the rest of the female reproductive system. They aren’t transgender characters — they’re people’s fetishes. Some writers will adamantly insist, “NO, HE’S A CUNTBOY. HE ISN’T TRANS. I AM SCARED OF TRANS PEOPLE BECAUSE I HATE WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND.” 

See, before researching this episode, I was in the same place about mpreg — I hated it because I didn’t understand it. A lot of the ways in which people write it are still disgusting and fetishistic, but I think I’m beginning to see the appeal of it if it’s done well.

So maybe, I hated mpreg for the same reason but in two different ways. It fetishizes gay men and assimilates them into roles with which straight people are familiar because they don’t understand how gay relationships work. They assume that feminine = degrading and submissive. 

And maybe, myself and many others have a powerful reaction of disgust to mpreg because we find the doctrine of feminine = degrading to be offensive, but still we hold onto that very same belief on a more subconscious level. A man being brought down to the level and function of a woman? Revolting. So there is a difference between poorly written mpreg — lazy, fetishistic, and heteronormative — and believe it or not, well-written mpreg, which is creative, explorative, and dramatic.

OMEGAVERSE

That brings us to a subgenre of mpreg: omegaverse. What is omegaverse? It’s a popular type of AU in which the population consists of alphas (dominants), betas (regular people, no one cares about betas, honestly), and omegas (submissives). There are lots of variations on it and worldbuilding is an important aspect, but generally what you need to know is that it gives people wolf-like breeding characteristics. Regardless of sex or gender, anyone can belong to any of these categories — in fact, categorizations generally rely on someone’s personality. For instance, if you’re pushy and domineering, then you’ll most likely be an alpha.

“Knotting” is also a common part of the smut scenes. This is when a dick swells up so that you can’t pull out of whatever orifice you’re fucking until you’re done with sex. Obviously, humans don’t do it, but other species like dogs do. It gives the alpha even more power. Omegas also go through heat periods like wild animals in which they just NEED dick, and they can get pregnant (and often do in these fics), again, regardless of sex.

Basically, this reflects gender roles stronger than those present in regular mpreg. There is an explicit power dynamic. Men: alphas; women: omegas. If our society were as extreme as this (and it is in some places in the world), it would be pretty fucking terrible. With such a focus on breeding, the entirety of a very large population is being treated and used as nothing more than breeding stock, and they have little purpose outside that. If you have an alpha woman, you give her a cock and that makes her powerful, and if a man is weak, he usually keeps his dick, but he obtains other aspects of female biology, namely the ability to get pregnant.

Rape and rape culture are hugely reflected in omegaverse, and it’s sad to know that mostly women write these stories. Breeding cycles and going into heat at inopportune times are frequently used as plot points. Regardless of whether an omega wants it or not, it’s a deep biological need for them, and often an alpha just has to step in and fuck them. It’s questionable at best, and a lot of the time, it’s straight up, explicit rape. Alphas have to “take care” of omegas in heat one way or another, whether that means that they need to lock the omega in a room until the urge passes, or they’re strangers on the street and the alpha just can’t help itself, and, well, the omega was just asking for it because their sexuality is out of control and it’s their only defining characteristic, at least in that moment. 

Omegaverse seems like an excuse for rape fic because omegas can’t give consent while in heat. They’re in an impaired state of consciousness, and a lot of the time any dick will work and they’ll fuck whoever will fuck them. Think about someone who’s drunk and you’re sober. They’re saying they want to have sex with you, but since their control over themselves is lacking, if you agree, you’re taking advantage of them, and it could easily be considered rape. Often a rapist and victim becomes lovers in these universes. Nasty. That’s all I have to say about that. Furthermore, omegas can be pressured into keeping their babies when they don’t want them, even if it’s after they’ve been raped. Similar ideas are espoused in the broader genre of mpreg sometimes, too. Things get even more backwards when you factor that in.

So why are women into omegaverse fic, which is essentially fetishistic mpreg on steroids? Do the people who write this have the old-fashioned fantasy of being dominated by a man and being used solely for sex and procreation? Because somehow this entire genre, except for the small percentage of omegaverse fics that are actively subverting its tropes, manages to be very anti-feminist/anti-progressive, but not in the way that most media that features an all-male or mostly-male cast does. Do these authors not realize what they’re writing because it’s disguised as a gay narrative? They’re projecting traditionalist fantasies onto gay men and portraying these relationships as having the same set of problems that straight relationships have. They are doing to gay men what straight men have been doing to women all along, and this demonstrates how a large subset of the female population still doesn’t know its own value and that women can be their own people. And the focus on men, male relationships, men doing things together, just strengthens this notion. Or is this just some sort of bizarre revenge? Are straight women saying, “This is what it’s like, fellas. This is what you put us through, so what if it happened to you?”

CLOSING THOUGHTS: RECAP AND SELF-AWARENESS

Because of the deeply embedded misogyny in our culture, women are underrepresented in media, and the largely female population of fanfiction writers devalue themselves as human beings. That means that they not only have mostly men to write about, but that they PREFER to write about men. And when they write about gay pairings, they apply the inherently sexist, traditionalist dynamics of a heterosexual relationship to a relationship that does NOT contain those gender-based dynamics, fundamentally misunderstanding how gay and lesbian relationships differ from straight ones. Ultimately, MISOGYNY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FETISHIZATION OF QUEER IDENTITIES IN FANFICTION. (That’s my thesis statement, by the way. In case you were unclear.)

Does this account for every fanfiction? No. Is misogyny the only thing causing the fetishization of queer identities? No. But do I think that this perspective can explain a significant chunk of what’s out there? Yes.

I’ve outlined in the disclaimer that I recorded for The Bar Is Low and mentioned probably a bunch of times before and after it that self-awareness is an insanely underrated characteristic that people need to have. Fuck being nice. Fuck being smart. That doesn’t count for shit if you’re not self-aware. And my view is that it’s okay to write shit that’s fucked up as long as you KNOW that it’s fucked up and you showcase self-awareness. And what I aim to do with this episode is to increase the self-awareness of fanfic writers and readers. 

You can do whatever you want in fiction, and plenty of people use that as a wall to hide behind. “So what if I’m writing kiddie porn? It isn’t real!” Your writing and your attitude towards it reflects something about society, it reflects something about your community and the people you associate with, it reflects your beliefs, what you want, your intelligence, and your self-awareness. 

To truly condemn hypocrisy is to be self-aware. Self-awareness is knowing that something you like perpetuates harmful attitudes or is going to offend someone, and then coming out and saying that you DO know better than that. I am not asking for your fanfiction to make a Big Statement about the hardships that women and queers have suffered. I am not asking you to never again write anything that could be considered offensive, or controversial, or even fucked up, whether it’s porn or a story with a plot. A lot of great literature is about really fucked up stuff. We need an avenue to explore the darker parts of the human existence.

As for porn, people are turned on by whatever they’re turned on by, and that’s not something you can choose. You shouldn’t necessarily be ashamed of your kinks (unless you’re a pedophile, then fuck you). And if gay people are your fetish, if you think two dudes boning is super hot and you’re a straight woman, or if you like futa or “cuntboys” or whatever else — what I’m asking for isn’t for you to stop producing or consuming porn of that.

All I’m asking is that you’re aware. Aware of how fiction and reality differ. How gay people and straight people, and men and women aren’t the same. Maybe we’re different, but we’re equal. Aware that by producing porn of various queer identities does not make you supportive of that community, and if anything it’s offensive, and you shouldn’t go around thinking “but I can’t be homophobic! I love yaoi!”

Inequality is reflected in fanfiction and shipping and just life in general all the time. All I’m asking is that you’re aware of how what you create and consume are reflections and products of society. We are not each other’s playthings. Fiction is fiction, and you can do what you want there as long as you realize how it transfers over into real life.

And just be nice. Coming from me of all people. Don’t walk around ignorant and inconsiderate of other people and with a heart full of hate. I know I say a lot of foul things on my show, and I talk shit on someone’s writing in almost every single episode. But with a very small handful of exceptions, I don’t hate any of the writers I cover as people.

What I’m saying is always strive to be more understanding and to learn more about yourself and the world and people around you. Do your research and think things through instead of deciding straight away that you hate something or that you can never change your opinions. All I’m asking is that you try to be more aware. That’s my call to action, just to make it super obvious.

I know I’m not all the way there, and I never will be. No one ever will be. I’m just a college kid. I don’t know shit. Whether or not you listen to me is not a choice I can make. And while I’m being all preachy and shit, have safe sex and wear a condom, and don’t rape people, and if someone says “I don’t want to talk about it,” don’t pressure them to talk about it, and if you’re writing porn, just say cock, not “manhood” or “engorged member” or one of those other stupid euphemisms!

Even though it seems niche, I think this is a worthwhile topic. We can use it to learn a lot about each other and our society and examine our attitudes towards both others and ourselves. Please, please, please, be thoughtful, be considerate, and be aware.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources I used and would like to thank:  
“The Sweet Science of Shipping” - Fandom.com  
“Women Who Fetishize Gay Men” - r/GenderCritical [NOTE JULY 2020: I wasn't aware that this was a TERF sub until it got banned. I found the thread while doing general searches on the topic of this essay, not through Reddit, but there were still some interesting opinions on it that I wanted to address. Nonetheless, I'd like to clarify that I support trans people, and not TERFs -- if that wasn't made clear by the essay itself.]  
“In Defense of Mpreg” - paradoxofamaskedman (and the commenters)  
“Friends, Let’s Talk About Omegaverse” - sugaredwhimsey  
Problematic, “Omegaverse and why it’s basically rape culture” - Evanaissante
> 
> Thanks for reading. I welcome discussion and comments, but if all you’re going to say is “blah blah blah you generalized” then just don’t bother. Because I already know that I generalized. Before you comment, make sure you didn’t miss the point. I had that happen to a few people last time. If I overlooked something (for example, I didn’t consider how age affects all of this until one of the commenters on the last version brought it up), feel free to let me know. Let’s keep things civilized, please.
> 
> You can find this essay in audio form on iTunes, Blubrry, Castbox, Spotify, and podcasts.com. My show is called The Bar Is Low and usually it’s about way less sophisticated stuff than this, like weird porn. Supposedly, it’s a comedy podcast, so if that piques your interest, I’d much appreciate it if you checked it out.


	2. Porn And Reality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few months ago, I came across a fic involving pedophilia, in which the author adamantly insisted in the comment section that by reading porn about one’s deviant sexual interests, it prevents them from acting out on their often disgusting and illegal urges in real life. How true is that? Well, I had to do some research, and this is what I found.
> 
> Topics covered:  
Fiction: Why do we like it, and how does it affect us?  
The purpose of this essay: How does porn affect our perceptions of and actions in reality?  
Sexual fantasies: How accurately do sexual fantasy and sexual activity reflect one another?  
Incest porn: Why do people like it, and who consumes it?  
Rape porn: How does it relate to sexual violence in real life?  
Child porn: Why is it banned, and how does it relate to sex crimes in real life?  
Conclusion: Is censorship the solution? How can we apply all this to fandom?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adapted from Episode 75 of my podcast, The Bar Is Low.
> 
> I did my best to not let my emotions get too tangled up in this episode, and to keep an open mind and not just go out to confirm my own opinions. Was I completely successful? No. I think that it’s impossible to completely lack bias, and that sometimes you do have to trust your emotions a little. But just as a disclaimer, I went more with facts, data, and logic than I went with my gut. This isn’t going to be a perfect analysis, but shit dude, I put a lot of effort and research into these essays, so hear me out. Please try to read this with an open mind as well, otherwise you’re just going to get pissed off.
> 
> I also tried to cite credible sources such as scholarly, peer-reviewed articles during the parts of the episode I felt needed it, but for some other parts (such as when I explore why people ship incest), I didn’t do that. Either way, I’ll be listing my sources in the end notes, so if you want to look further into it, you can. The numbers in parentheses throughout the text denote my citations.

A few months ago, I was looking for fanfiction to feature on an episode of my podcast The Bar Is Low, and I found a fic in which a teenage boy coerces his eight-year-old brother into sex (I’m not going to name the fic or the fandom here).

I don’t remember the details because all I did was skim this particular work, but what I do remember was the absolute shitfest in the comments section. There was a thread with the author and a reviewer going back and forth, and the reviewer was hounding this guy for writing something so disgusting, while the author was insisting that first of all, don’t like don’t read —that it was the reviewer’s fault for clicking in the first place since the fic was properly tagged, and secondly, that by writing this sort of thing and giving pedophiles something to get off to, they can save children who would’ve otherwise been victims of people who didn’t have anywhere else to channel their urges.

I didn’t buy this, and I’ll tell you what I found while researching it and make it crystal clear. Maybe this is true of some people — maybe after consuming child porn, some pedophiles, like the author, are satisfied, but there’s plenty of evidence to point to the conclusion that on a larger scale, this is false. A significant percentage of the people who face charges for possession or distribution of child pornography are offending pedophiles — a statistic that we’ll get back to.

This seems to be a very common mentality in the world of fandom. It’s just fiction. I can write all the child porn and other dark, twisted stuff that I want because no one’s getting hurt. Right? Well, let’s take a look and see how fiction affects our reality. Because it absolutely does.

FICTION: Why do we like it, and how does it affect us?

Storytelling is universal throughout human cultures, so it must have some purpose. By consuming fiction, we hone our sense of empathy. Fiction allows us to see from others’ perspectives as we experience life from different ages, genders, races, time periods, places, and lifestyles. Vicariously, we can experience things we’d never have the chance to live through ourselves.

Fiction communicates social norms and morals. Stories usually contain some sort of lesson or universal truth meant to teach its listeners about how the world works or how we should act. Fiction can also serve as a form of escapism. Sometimes life just sucks. Or it’s boring. So you immerse yourself in someone else’s for a while.

Why do we like dark stories? That sure isn’t escapism. Well, we have so much fiction with dark elements to explore themes to which we normally wouldn’t be exposed, but since the stories aren’t real, we still have the option to tap out at any time. Humans like getting scared or disgusted in controlled, safe environments where we know that we’ll make it out on the other side all right, hence why, say, horror movies are popular.

Dark fiction is still important to learning empathy by allowing us to better understand those who have been through something traumatic in real life. Take abuse for instance. If it is framed in the right way — making us empathize with the victim versus romanticizing the relationship between them and their abuser — then we can understand what the character is going through, how the ordeal affects them, and the nature of abuse, versus something that is framed as a torture porn and seems to have a lot of graphic and dark content just for the hell of it.

Additionally, abuse survivors would be able to relate to and empathize with the characters even more as they may see elements of their own experience in the story, and even though it’s fiction, they might end up feeling less alone. Or it might be upsetting for them to relive their trauma. That can happen too.

These are mostly good things, positive ways in which fiction affects us and our reality, but let’s talk about something more relevant: the negative ways in which fiction impacts us. Fandom can be great in a lot of ways, allowing us to meet other people with similar interests, exercise our creativity through fanfiction and fanart, and to encourage other creators. But it’s got its downsides. When fans feel entitled, they can harass actors and content creators and generally act like assholes. Take Marvel for example, a bunch of adult virgins were like “first an all-black cast, now a female superhero? Time to throw a bitch fit!” or the newest Star Wars trilogy: “a black stormtrooper? A female lead? Oh no! I am a straight white man who thinks he’s oppressed for liking nerdy things, and I can’t stand the thought of my favorite franchise catering to people who aren’t like me!” Or fans being mad about no national Pokedex in Pokemon Sword and Shield, so they hurl rape accusations at one of the game’s creators.

There’s also lots of examples of fans harassing each other, like with shipping wars. I hope we can all agree that shipping wars are foolish. Take Hermione/Harry versus Hermione/Ron as a popular example. Nothing inherently wrong with either of those pairings, but people got into shitstorm arguments about it (and probably still do). But there is debate over whether the sentiment “don’t harass people over their ships” should include pairings with incest and pedophilia.

Shipping wars are annoying, but wait, there’s more. Take the classic example of toxic fans when the Steven Universe fandom drove a girl to attempt suicide because she drew a character too skinny and that was apparently erasism of fat representation.

Well-executed fiction can be great, and there’s a lot we can learn from it. But sometimes we get too worked up, and about the wrong things. If you argue that fiction doesn’t affect reality, you’re lying. Just by participating in fandom, fiction has affected your life. For fuck’s sake. You’re reading this on Archive Of Our Own. I know you didn’t come here to learn about the history of aviation or the science of electromagnetism or some shit. You’re here because you like fiction.

And then there’s porn. Porn in fanfiction can definitely have artistic value. It can illuminate and explore relationships between characters, it can delve into a character’s psyche, and it can do all of this while you beat your meat. Porn, I think, exists in a gray zone that can easily tend towards darker areas in most fandoms.

Of course, there’s real person fanfiction, and writing porn about people who actually exist is pretty gross and uncomfortable and intrusive and you shouldn’t do that, but fictional characters? Go wild. Knock yourself out. No one’s getting hurt. Right?

I’ve often made a distinction on The Bar Is Low about tastefully handled darkfic versus porn that exists just for you to jack it to something really sick and twisted, and the line between the two. It depends how it is framed. Though I prefer things with more depth to them for my leisure time, and the blunter, more pornographic fics are often more fun for me to cover on the show, I’ve overall become less judgmental about people writing whatever they want.

The problem is that people draw the line in different places. I draw it around the fic I talked about in the intro — porn about a minor who is too young to even know what sex is, while I’m more tolerant (though not exactly approving of) other taboo things like incest and adult/teenager ships in fandom. The reader always has the option to not click on something, and the author always has the responsibility to tag and label their fic appropriately. But that does not guarantee safety. Neither does censorship.

But how bad are all these things actually, and where should we draw this line? That’s what we’re here to talk about today.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY: How does porn affect our perceptions of and actions in reality?

It’s obvious to say that the internet has made porn more accessible, and this has in turn affected our culture and normalized a lot of things that were previously taboo. But there are still categories that haven’t been made mainstream — or maybe they’re more mainstream than we think? — that are far from uncommon online.

What I want to explore today are dark fics that more often fall on the tasteless side of the spectrum I’ve outlined and deal with the taboo, fics that often promote ‘problematic ships’ and other controversial content, especially in porn — and I want to explore what these fics say about their creators and consumers. I’m going to rely less on my own speculations and more on evidence and expert opinion to come to a conclusion about how fiction affects real life, and I want to answer this question: by reading fanfiction or consuming other porn about your darkest (and possibly illegal) sexual urges, does that satiate your impulse to act on them in real life, or is it the other way around? We’ve already discussed how fiction affects reality, but how does porn in specific affect our perceptions of and actions in reality?

Here are some more specific questions I want to answer: if you read porn about pedophilia, are you more or less likely to sexually abuse a child? If you consume porn about women being brutalized or raped, will that affect how you treat them in real life, and what does it say about your sexual desires and if you will act on them? Do incest shippers want to fuck their relatives? What’s the appeal of incest anyways?

There may not be definitive answers to all these questions, the research may not exist, and the conclusions we come to here may not apply to everyone, but we’ll explore what’s out there, and then we’ll loop back around to the question of censorship and fandom.

SEXUAL FANTASIES: How accurately do sexual fantasy and sexual activity reflect one another?

Porn is a middle ground between having sexual fantasies and acting on them, albeit much closer to the fantasy side of things. Because fantasy and porn are so similar, it’s important to discuss how fantasy affects reality before we delve into the real meat of the episode.

Sexual fantasies are a normal part of being human, even “weird” sexual fantasies are typical. They serve as a way of trying to stay sexually satisfied in situations where reality doesn’t suffice. Some fantasies do become real, but a lot don’t, and for various reasons.

There are impossible sexual fantasies — you’re not gonna be able to fuck Sonic the Hedgehog in real life. Sorry, furries, but that’s just how it be. Fantasies can be blocked by moral, legal, and cultural restraints — maybe you’re married, but there’s someone else catching your eye. If you’re a strong believer in remaining faithful to your partner, then those fantasies are staying fantasies.

There are things about reality that we can ignore in fantasy. For example, I’ve had sexual fantasies about eating ass, but do I really wanna toss some salad in real life? Probably not. It would smell bad and I'm not too keen on the idea of ingesting someone else’s of shit even if it’s only a little bit. A lot of people don’t have any intention of ever carrying out a sexual fantasy of theirs. Another example of this is rape fantasy, in which one fantasizes about being coerced into sex. It doesn’t mean that they actually want to be raped. She (or he) still has full control of the fantasy in their head, but it’s the idea of the loss of control that makes the fantasy entertaining in the first place. And people like to think of themselves as so desirable that somebody just HAS to have them, even if that’s by force.

And some fantasies are exploratory — people wondering what a certain experience would be like from the safety of their own minds. For instance, straight people sometimes have fantasies about members of the same gender, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily want to try gay sex.

Sex crimes, however, can start off as fantasies. Consider serial killers with sexual aspects to their crimes. You don’t follow someone home, rape and kill them, and then get away with it multiple times without having thought about it first. However, it’s less about the content of a sexual fantasy and more about the “recurrence, intensity, necessity, and the lack of overall diversity that seem crucial to evaluate risk of acting out” (1). So a normal dude might have a fantasy or two about raping someone, among other things, but the person who will act on it is fixated on that one fantasy and has had it over and over. Violent sexual fantasy alone is also not an indicator of future sex crime. Having psychopathic traits adds to the danger that someone will act out.

So does fantasy — something that stays inside your head — affect reality? Sometimes. But usually, it never does. It would make sense to assume that fiction — something that started off in your or someone else’s head and ended up on your computer screen, tv, or on paper — it would make sense to assume that it would have a little more bearing on reality than a mere fantasy, and since it reaches other people as well, it would affect some of them, too.

INCEST PORN: Why do people like it, and who consumes it?

We’re going to discuss three different categories of porn to see how they relate to reality, and we’ll start with incest porn. I chose incest, rape, and child porn because I see them a lot in fandom, and I’ve always found them to be the darkest. I could’ve included beastiality here as well, but I didn’t feel that it was common enough to merit its own section.

Before discussing why some of us like incest, let’s answer this question: why does incest gross most of us out?

Incest is associated with abuse, rape, and inbreeding. Most incestuous relationships tend to be unhealthy, so naturally, they repulse us. There’s also an evolutionary explanation for why we don’t like incest called inbreeding depression. Humans are also predisposed to avoid inbreeding because genetic variability is beneficial to survival. Inbred children are more likely to have health and fertility issues due to deleterious recessive alleles, which are harmful genes that may be carried by most members of a family. If relatives breed with one another, those genes build up and to produce deformed offspring, but with outbreeding, dominant traits will continue to mask those genes. So the more closely related parents are, the more recessive traits will show up in their kids, and the more generations of inbreeding you have, the worse this phenomenon gets.

Our aversion to sex with family members is also triggered by growing up with them. That’s why if you’ve had step siblings from an early age, you’re probably grossed out by the idea of sex with them, even though you aren’t biologically related. Or if you’ve had a friend since kindergarten, you’re probably a little repulsed by them in a sexual manner.

Before we get any further into this, I want to say that healthy and consensual incestuous relationships can exist. A lot of the time it happens when two people get together sexually/romantically first and find out they’re related afterwards, so the incest aversion response caused by growing up with someone doesn’t apply to them. Or sometimes they DID grow up together but they want to get involved anyways. Sex between consenting adults? Who am I to say they can’t do it just because I think it’s gross?

But why does that happen? Why do we have incest shippers? Why do some people think that relatives fucking each other is hot? Why is Alabama… like that?

I found this explanation written by an incest shipper, and it’s mostly about why people ship consensual incest between siblings (2). It leaves out similar concepts like non-consensual relationships and parent/child pairings, though some of these reasons could apply to those dynamics as well, but even a lot of people who like sibling incest are grossed out by parent/child ships because the parent is abusing their power and there’s an icky age gap.

First of all, there’s the appeal of forbidden love. Not only do you have the external obstacles of people outside of the relationship saying that it’s gross and unnatural, but the people who are involved with each other are thinking “this is wrong, we shouldn’t be doing this” because incest is so taboo.

It’s also unconventional and breaks up the typical formula of a meet cute, and you’ve got multiple layers of love. Like a love onion. There’s the obligatory love of family. The familial love of when you actually like your family. Then platonic love. Then finally the sexual attraction and the romantic love. Boyfriends, girlfriends, and hookup partners may come and go, but family is forever. And there’s great potential for the confusion of feelings — “Do I love her like a brother usually loves a sister, or do I love her LIKE THAT?”

A lot of incest ships were bound to get shipped anyways if the characters weren’t siblings. You’re almost guaranteed shippy moments that you can easily interpret as having subtext. We’re so used to romantic/sexual relationships in media and fandom that we transfer that dynamic onto people who are related — sexualization is everywhere.

And of course, there are the people who ship incest because they want to fuck their cousins, or they were victims in real life and it helps them get over the incestuous aspect of their abuse. And people ship non-consensual incest likely for the same reasons you’d ship any other unhealthy relationship: because there’s an interesting relationship dynamic to explore there. Or, again, if they were abused and it helps them get over it.

Anyway that’s an explanation of all shippy stuff. Romance. But we’re here today to talk about the porn, so let’s talk about the goddamn porn. There’s a tendency towards darker ships having more explicit content, which includes incest ships. If you’re gonna break a taboo, you’re gonna BREAK THAT TABOO. Porn’s job has always been to show the forbidden, but we’re kinda running out of taboos. So what’s left? Incest.

Here’s a quote from an article in the Cosmopolitan about why people like incest porn, which isn’t exactly a scholarly source, but this explanation made sense to me:

> “It plays into a lot of role play and BDSM scenarios. Most incest porn is not playing off an actual desire to have sex with a family member, but more like experiencing the intimacy and power dynamics inherent in those kinds of family relationships. For instance, a daddy/girl relationship doesn't mean that those people are attracted to their actual dads or daughters — it could mean they like the power play of a BDSM relationship but want that kind of caring, unconditional love folded into their sex lives. A parent/child relationship lends more of a sense of nurturing or ‘feeling special’ to porn that you wouldn't get between say, a masseuse and their client in a different video. And on top of that, there's a layer of forbidden sex that adds to the whole thing — a trend that's also popping up in pornos that depict people having illicit sex in public places. Incest role-play is basically a kink layer-cake” (3).

So incest porn is popular because of the allure of a forbidden, yet very close sort of relationship that includes a lot of different types of love, and it doesn’t have to be inherently disgusting. Generally, I think it’s safe to say that incest shippers aren’t boning or even want to bone their relatives. (Also, I think we can blame Game of Thrones a little bit for the popularity of incest porn. Just a lil bit. Ignore everything I just said and blame it on them.)

RAPE PORN: How does it relate to sexual violence in real life?

I’m not going to spend too much time on this section, because mostly, it lays some of the groundwork for the upcoming section on child porn. Before we specifically discuss porn, let’s discuss the cultural context and what we call rape culture. Here’s a definition: “Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture” (4). Some aspects of rape culture include victim-blaming —you’ve heard all these before: “What was she wearing?” “Was she drunk?” “Yeah, she was just asking for it.” “But isn’t she already a slut?” “She must’ve wanted it.”

Rape culture trivializes sexual assault, focusing on how the lives of the perpetrators will be ruined if they face charges, instead of the consequences that the victim will have to live with. It teaches women to avoid getting raped instead of teaching men not to rape people in the first place.

Men are victims of rape culture as well, as sexual violence against them is even more trivialized than that against women. There’s a notion that men can’t get raped, especially not by a woman. Men are strong. They’re not supposed to be victims. And they’re supposed to always want sex. That’s toxic masculinity (see the previous chapter, “Misogyny and the Fetishization of Queer Identities in Fanfiction”).

And most importantly to our topic today, rape culture is reinforced by gendered violence in the media.

So culture informs attitudes about rape. But does it simply make us more permissive of sexual violence, or does it encourage us to get out there and perpetrate it? Here’s a quote from the article “Rape Culture, Victim Blaming, and the Role of Media in the Criminal Justice System” by Lily Thacker (5):

> “While few believe that men see rape on television and immediately decide to assault someone, it is clear that the media’s normalization of rape does inform male attitudes about it; given the pervasiveness of its representations of rape, even a man who is only a moderate consumer of mass media would have difficulty not coming across the subject, and such discourses about rape have the ability to affect and even make way for future actions.”

She follows with this example of how media shapes our perceptions of rape:

> “The way that media portrays rape is just as important as the frequency of those portrayals because they are often ill-informed; mainstream media depicts rape in a way that is inadequate and often biased. For example, sexual assault is often depicted as stranger rape, despite the fact that 73% of assaults are committed by someone the victim knows. This depiction of rapists as crazed animals who are hypersexual and jump out from behind bushes to attack women at night is harmful because it informs the public’s view of who is and is not capable of committing rape, therefore convincing them that men who do not act in such a way could not have raped someone.”

Another example of this phenomenon from my online experiences is that a lot of rape porn I’ve read implies that people enjoy being raped. So many times I’ve covered fanfictions on The Bar Is Low where midway through being assaulted, the victim starts to enjoy themselves. Maybe there is some physical pleasure, but that doesn’t cancel out the overall trauma of being violated like that. Hence, in real life, we hear the logic that the victim must’ve wanted it, or more likely, it’s the other way around — people write fanfiction like this because of the notion that rape victims must’ve wanted to be assaulted.

Is media like this because of our pre-existing beliefs, or are these our beliefs because of media? Since the sexist beliefs that have dictated societal structure precede mass media, it’s not a stretch to infer that cultural attitudes are to blame for what we see in the media. But no matter which came first, rape porn and rape culture reinforce each other. Society is already far too tolerant of sexual assault, and the depictions of it in media pave the way for men to enjoy it in pornography.

CHILD PORN: Why is it banned, and how does it relate to sex crimes in real life?

This section is going to be the longest because as someone who’s been running a podcast largely about porn for about a year and a half now, I’ve learned that sexual depictions of very young children are the one thing I won’t click on because they’re too disgusting even for me. This whole section I’m borrowing pretty heavily from an article called “Virtual Child Pornography: The Children Aren’t Real, But The Dangers Are: Why The Ashcroft Court Got it Wrong” (6).

First of all, what is child porn? Federal law defines it as any visual depiction of minors engaged in sexually explicit acts. (Personally, I disagree with the “visual” keyword here — many people come to this website for porn, and most of it isn’t visual.) Child porn includes material both in which real children were involved in its making, and virtual child porn, which can consist of computer generated images that still pose an indirect danger to kids. A lot of virtual child porn is indistinguishable from child porn that uses live actors.

However, the law (PROTECT Act of 2003) does not explicitly state that images of fictional beings who appear to be under 18 engaged in sexual acts are illegal (illustration of sex of fictional minors). Cartoon child porn is a legal grey area, and laws varying country by country and state by state. Either way, in some places, you can be arrested for lolicon and shota.

Why is child porn banned? (I really feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this, but I’m going to anyways.) It harms children psychologically and physically. Children who are sexually exploited have higher rates of self harm, suicide, prostitution, and drug/alcohol abuse, have difficulty forming intimate relationships later on in life, and are more likely to become abusers themselves.

“But freedom of speech!” you cry out as your right to jerk it to preteens getting buttfucked is trampled upon! Hate to break it to you, but there are a few types of speech that aren’t protected by the first amendment, such as fighting words, blackmail, defamation, solicitation to commit crimes, perjury, true threats, obscenity, inciting imminent lawless action (that’s one we’ll get back to later), and child porn. Explicitly not protected.

To bring up framing again, even if the work has some sort of value, which it rarely does, that doesn’t matter to the child who was involved. It’s still harming them. Essentially, any good that may come of letting people express themselves is outweighed by how nasty child porn is and how it important it is to protect children.

Porn is worse than regular sexual abuse because that it’s on record. Here’s a quote from an article called “Blocking child porn isn’t about censorship — it keeps children safe” (7) that explains it very well:

> “Think for a moment about the most humiliating and degrading moment you have ever experienced. Think of the desperate helplessness you felt. Now imagine that someone had managed to capture that moment. That image was then spread across the globe so that no matter how far you ran you could never be sure that those you meet did not see it. Now imagine the scenario for a victim of child sexual abuse whose trauma has been recorded and disseminated for the sexual gratification of others. Try to comprehend the on-going harm that victim suffers as long as the image remains available for others to view, their sense of being re-abused again and again and being defined by defilement for ever.”

“But violent video games!” you weep. “But the violence omnipresent in entertainment!” There are different cultural contexts for sex and violence. Violence in mainstream entertainment is normal, and it pretty much always has been. Your ancestors probably went to public executions just for funsies. Jesus got crucified (a horrible way to die, by the way) and everyone went and made fanart of it.

But sex? Big no-no. You can have graphic violence in a PG-13 movie, but show a woman’s nipple in a sexual context? That’s an R rating. Say “fuck” more than once? R rating. Show someone smoking weed? You guessed it, R rating. Violence is normal. We’re desensitized to it.

Here’s a quote from an article that helped me out a lot and not just for this section (8):

> “The social context murder fiction is created in is different than the social context of abusive fiction. Do violent video games cause violence? No. Do Americans live in a society that has been violent for centuries, so we consume violence as a form of entertainment due to internalizing it? Yes. Is fiction the predecessor to abuse in our society? No. Has abuse been a social norm in our society for centuries, so we consume media that glorifies it without batting an eyelash? Yes. The role media plays in cultures of violence is reaffirming the status quo rather than challenging it, which helps maintain the status quo. It becomes a violence-affirmation cycle that we perpetuate. This is pointedly different from the view that people absorb all media’s contents, so if they see violence, they’re going to reenact that violence” (8).

The violence we see is not because someone played a first person shooter game and decided it would be fun to try it in real life. Though violent video games do increase aggression (and aggression does not necessarily always lead to violence), the shootings we keep having nowadays can be traced to people having access to guns and being mentally unhinged white supremacists. Not to them watching too many horror movies.

Additionally, violent people are attracted to violent things, and a lot of violent media just consists of men’s power fantasies. Like with rape porn, violent movies and video games may desensitize us to graphic content and inform our perceptions of their real-life counterparts, but they don’t lead directly to crime.

So rape is normal, violence is normal, but is pedophilia normal? It’s not as taboo as you might think. Here are some examples of what’s called pedophile culture.

We sexualize kids, especially famous ones like underage actors. Young girls in their teens and preteens often try to look sexy, wearing makeup and clothes meant for women much older than them. (I’m all for self-expression and girls dressing in ways that make them feel confident, but you’ve got your whole adulthood to do that. Enjoy your childhood while it lasts, and definitely don’t dress up for other people’s sakes — do it for yourself.)

Men favor childlike features in women, and to a degree, this is an evolutionary development — younger women are more fertile and still have a lot of time left to have babies. But you can’t say this isn’t pushed by society as well. There’s a standard of having no body hair and a pressure to stay thin and young looking. Hairlessness is only natural when you’re prepubescent anyways, so that’s not a pro “but it’s biology!” argument. Maternal complications a leading cause of death for 15-19 year-old girls — they are physically not ready to have children. Also not a pro “but it’s biology!” argument.

A slight age gap between male and female partners (with the male being older) is universal, natural, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s common for men (especially wealthy and powerful men) to date women MUCH younger than them. When you reverse that age gap, it’s treated like a kink to be attracted to older women. Attractive underage girls are called “jailbait,” which places the blame on them and not the adults who prey on them (9).

And for fuck’s sake, the most popular category on Pornhub is “teen.” There’s probably a lot of teenage boys probably beating off to that stuff, so that’s fine for them, but I doubt that one age group alone could push a category to the top. Maybe they gave it an extra boost, but that’s still alarmingly popular among, well, everyone else.

And this section isn’t to say that there are only female victims of pedophilia and only male perpetrators. But it is disproportionately that way.

So is pedophilia actually that taboo? Preying on teenagers and other young women isn’t, but fucking prepubescent children still is. A teenager who knows what sex is can consent, even if they shouldn’t. Eighteen isn’t some magic number where on your birthday you immediately gain full cognitive capacity and you’re as mature as any other adult — but they had to put the legal cutoff somewhere.

Teenagers fuck. Teenagers should fuck other teenagers because even if they’ve reached the legal age of consent, they don’t have the life experience of, say, a thirty year old. But because teenagers can fuck, creepy old guys are like “these kids fuck, we fuck, why not fuck each other?”

Prepubescent children, meanwhile, do not and should not fuck. That is very taboo and very illegal. If you hear about a four year old versus a fourteen year old being sexually assaulted, which scenario produces more disgust? The one involving the four year old. I’ve covered many fourteen year old rapes on my show, but I did one fic involving a four year old rape and it was the worst thing I’ve ever had on The Bar Is Low. There is no way a four year old can consent, unlike an adult woman (or even a teenager) who can be raped, or two relatives who want to bone each other. There is no justification.

Let’s go back to the article (6) and talk about direct versus indirect harm. If you’re a kid being filmed in a live porno, then obviously, that’s direct harm. But child porn can indirectly harm minors as well. Pedophiles groom kids with child porn to desensitize them, break down their barriers, and ultimately convince them to engage in some sort of sexual activity. Could a pedophile do that with regular porn? Yeah, probably. But seeing someone their age enjoying sex is going to be more effective. Sex isn’t seen as an “adult thing.” It’s something they can do too.

And there’s a strong correlation between child porn charges and molesting kids. I’m just going to include this whole section of the paper, so get ready for a lot of numbers and statistics. (I know you’re probably going to skim this, but I thought it was important.)

> “Exact percentages vary, but experts have come to a general conclusion that there is in fact some link between viewing child pornography and sexually molesting children. A study by the New Zealand Internal Affairs suggested that there was ‘an association between viewing child pornography and committing child sexual abuse.’ A New York Times article in 2007 discussed a new controversial government study of convicted Internet offenders. The research was carried out by psychologists at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and found that many men who claim to be ‘just looking at pictures’ could, in fact, be predators. In the study, 155 male inmates, all serving sentences for possession or distribution of child pornography, had volunteered for the 18 month treatment program at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C. More than 85 percent admitted to abusing at least one child, compared to the 26 percent that were known to have done so at the time of sentencing. The psychologists who conducted the study, Andres E. Hernandez and Michael L. Bourke, concluded that ‘many Internet child pornography offenders may be undetected child molesters.’ One convicted pedophile serving a 14-year sentence said that viewing child pornography gave him no release from his desires, but instead the exact opposite, furthering the sentiment that some men convicted of sexually abusing children had their urges fueled by child pornography. The pedophile was interviewed and quoted as saying: ‘[T]here is no way I can look at a picture of a child on a video screen and not get turned on by that and want to do something about it. I knew that in my mind. I knew that in my heart. I didn’t want it to happen, but it was going to happen.’
> 
> “Although that controversial study put the number at 85 percent, most other studies have put the correlation rate in the 40 percent range. ‘Forty percent of people charged with child pornography also sexually abuse children. But finding the predators and identifying the victims are daunting tasks.’ A 2000 study issued by the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that ‘76 percent of offenders convicted of internet-related crimes against children admitted to contact sex crimes with children previously undetected by law enforcement and had an average of 30.5 child sex victims each.’ According to the Mayo Clinic of the U.S.A., studies and case reports put that correlation rate between child pornography and child molesting between 30 and 80 percent. During one study, the majority of men who had been charged with or convicted of child pornography offenses showed pedophilic profiles on phallometric testing.” [A word about phallometric testing from the footnotes: “Clinicians and researchers use phallometry to quantify the sexual interests of sexual offenders against children. A meta-analytic review of 61 sex offender follow-up studies found that phallometrically assessed sexual arousal to children was the strongest predictor of subsequent sexual offenses among all the variables that were examined.”]
> 
> “‘Our results indicate that child pornography offending is a valid diagnostic indicator of pedophilia. Child pornography offenders were significantly more likely to show a pedophilic pattern of sexual arousal during phallometric testing than were comparison groups of offenders against adults or general sexology patients.
> 
> “A 1987 report by the U.S.A. National Institute of Justice said that there was a ‘disturbing correlation’ between viewing child pornography and sexually abusing children. From January 1997 through March 2004, 620 of the 1,807 child pornographers that were arrested, approximately 34 percent, were confirmed child molesters. The United States Postal Inspection Service, which compiles data based upon evidence derived from child pornography crime scene investigations and police reports, found that at least 80 percent of purchasers of child pornography were active abusers and nearly 40 percent of the child pornographers investigated during the last few years had sexually molested children in the past. Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces in states such as Pennsylvania and Texas found that 51 percent and 32 percent, respectively, of individuals that were arrested for viewing child pornography were also molesting children, or had done so in the past, further confirming ‘the positive correlation between the possession of child pornography and the commission of crimes against children.’”

So those are a lot of studies, and they aren’t perfect. What about the people who never got caught for child porn? What about the people who can’t get arrested for it because what they look at doesn’t quite fit legal definitions of child porn, but is definitely child porn, like, oh, I don’t know, fanfiction?

It’s always important to remember not to rely on the fallacy that correlation equals causation, which in this case would be that looking at child porn causes statutory rape. (I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that both things are caused just by being a pedophile.) And let’s remember that anecdotes aren’t scientific.

But all these studies arrived at a common conclusion: that there IS a correlation. If you consume child porn, it’s not unlikely that you’re also a child molester.

So what about all those people on the internet who draw or write porn of minors? They could be child molesters. If someone calls themselves non-offending, meaning that they haven’t broken the law and molested a kid, do you really have a way to tell if they’ll stay that way? Do you really have a way to tell if they were non-offending in the first place?

Some “minor attracted people” or “MAP”s for short, as they like to be called, are looking forward to the day when they can come out of the closet and be proud of their identity. They think their experience is like that of the LGBTQ community. Get fucked!

Yeah, no one chooses to be a pedophile, I understand that. If you avoid kids, aren’t supporting the child pornography industry, know that your attraction is wrong, you’re seeking help, and you never molest anyone, good for you. Keep it up. You’re doing great, but unfortunately a lot of pedophiles aren’t like that.

I’m not a parent nor do I ever plan on being one, but if someone spent a good chunk of their spare time writing or consuming porn of children, even if they said they would never actually act on those impulses, would you let them watch your kid? I know I wouldn’t. “I know I watch a lot of videos of cats and dogs being tortured and killed online, and I write out my detailed fantasies about all the ways I’d like to kill them myself, but I would never ACTUALLY hurt an animal!” Yeah, I think I’ll find someone else to watch my cat while I’m away on vacation, because you’re getting nowhere near her.

Virtual child porn is capable of inducing the same types of indirect harm. That’s why they decided to make it illegal along with live porn with real actors. Just because it’s virtual, that does not make it more meaningful or valuable, and it still isn’t protected under freedom of speech. (That’s not just my opinion. That’s the law.)

Lastly the article (6) talks about “inciting imminent lawless action” and the Brandenberg vs Ohio court case. And this is relevant today beyond just what we’re talking about with porn — you can apply it to Nazis and white supremacism.

During this case, a portion of a KKK speech was played, in which they made hateful remarks about Jews and black people. Most people don’t have radical views and therefore wouldn’t be affected by this speech, so it’s protected by the first amendment. But if you play a speech that says “go out and kill some black people” to a room full of KKK members, people who already hold radical views, then you’re inciting imminent lawless action and that speech is NOT protected, because those are the sort of people who might actually listen to that call to action.

Or, take the “only in the panhandle” Trump speech from a few months ago. Trump asks how to get rid of immigrants, someone suggests shooting them, and Trump doesn’t exactly disapprove of that idea, judging by his reaction. Who’s listening to that speech? Trump supporters, who are racists and white supremacists (sorry not sorry). So what happens a few months later? Someone goes out and shoots Hispanics. That’s inciting imminent lawless action.

So if you show child porn to a general audience, just like if you were to show that panhandle clip to a general audience, or that KKK speech to a general audience, all those people would be disgusted, or at least unaffected. But who’s really watching it? The target audience. Pedophiles are consuming child porn. A regular person isn’t gonna go out and molest kids if they saw a video of a nine year old sucking dick. But a pedophile might. And that’s why child porn is illegal. Because the people it’s meant for are the ones who are by far the most likely to act on their urges.

CONCLUSION: Is censorship the solution? How can we apply all this to fandom?

So I hope that we can all agree that in an ideal world, there would be no rape or child molestation, or even porn of those things. But is censorship the solution? Does it really work? (Let me make it clear that censoring something meant for adults just because a kid *might* stumble upon it should not be condoned.)

When you try to censor something that there’s so much of, you can’t have people combing the internet and hoping to catch every single pedophile out there. You have to use an algorithm, which usually doesn’t work very well. Maybe one day technology will improve to the point where it’s a viable option, but today is definitely not that day.

Take the Tumblr porn ban in December 2018 for example, a complete disaster. The algorithm flagged totally innocuous things like sand dunes, classical art, and raw chicken because they happened to be flesh colored. Hell, it even flagged a Christmas-themed edit of the profile picture I use on this site/the cover art of my podcast.

And still people find ways around the ban. Porn bots still follow me on Tumblr even though adult content is supposedly banned there. Illegalizing something drives the market underground and makes it harder to detect. Even if you ban the websites that host child porn, people will still send it to each other through private channels. New websites will pop up. They’ll find loopholes like drawing porn of fictional minors. Or writing fanfiction. Whether or not you support it, we are talking about this issue today largely because censorship is rarely, if ever, completely effective. The people who really want to access it will still find ways to do so.

What censorship can do, however, is stop people from stumbling across an image, getting intrigued, and searching for more. (I wish someone had done that for me and fanfiction.) If you never see child porn, then you might never find out that you’re a pedophile. The sexual fantasies you have will stay in your head, and no one will get hurt.

If censorship doesn’t work, then what will? That’s not a question with an easy solution, because society is going to have to change. We have to work against pedophile culture, male entitlement, the media, the nature of the internet, loopholes in the law, the stigma against mental illness... I could go on. There’s no fun way to put it, so I’m just going to say outright that probably nothing is going to change.

But what you, personally, can do is be aware of how fiction affects reality. If you see a bad ship or some other problematic content in your fandom, don’t immediately recoil in horror and decide to harass the author. Consider how the work is framed and what the authorial or artistic intent is. Since it can be ambiguous sometimes, you can even ask them some questions if you’re not clear. Authors love that shit.

But you also have every right to be wary. There are a lot of predators and other shitty people out there, and a lot of them are in fandom because erotic fanfiction and sexual depictions of fictional minors are still legal, so it’s a safe zone for them.

Along with the mentality that “it’s fiction, it doesn’t hurt anyone” there is another mentality that if something is even a little problematic, you’re not allowed to like it. Whether that’s because the creator did something wrong (let’s say that they made some antisemitic comments), or if issue is embedded within the media itself (let’s say that the characters in a show make antisemitic comments), those can both be reasons why someone will throw a fit. You’ll never be able to find media that’s completely ideologically pure. Something bad will get mixed in there somewhere along the way, and you just have to deal with it.

So, as I may have already implied, some people take the idea too far that if a piece of media or its creators seem to espouse harmful views, you should reject their work. And these people are fucking annoying. Just let people live their lives.

To a degree.

Just because “antis” are bothering you or going as far as to send you death threats, that doesn’t mean that you’re right and you should ship a 500 year old demon with a fourteen year old child! Even if that demon is in the body of a teenager or something! I still have every right to be wary of you, especially depending on how it’s framed.

My stance has always been that if you know and acknowledge that something is fucked up, and you avoid letting it affect you and your behavior as best you can, then it’s fine — now firmly with the exception of child porn, especially porn of prepubescent children. Otherwise, write it, read it, consume it, enjoy it.

Child pornography that you had a hand in creating could end in trauma for some poor kid somewhere. And I’m not talking about a kid accidentally stumbling upon it, I’m talking about a pedophile who uses it to whet their sexual appetite and it ends with rape. Porn can be an addiction, and like with drugs, you might need more and more every time to satisfy your needs, and one day, only the real thing becomes good enough.

Or someone uses it to groom a child and break down their sexual barriers. The stuff on fanfiction websites is easy to access and written child porn is still legal, but the same logic applies. Child porn is bad, you guys. If you try to fight me on this, your comment will be deleted because not all censorship is bad.

Do I think you’re a bad person if you have some deviant sexual interests? No, I don’t, so don’t try to put words in my mouth. For instance, I understand incest shipping a lot better now. Do I think you need to be reported to the authorities if your tastes in porn are a little violent? Also no. People who argue that “it’s just fiction!” tend to claim that “antis” can’t tell fiction from reality, but they neglect how fiction, does, in fact, affect reality.

And am I trying to act holier-than-thou? “It’s over, AO3. I have the moral high ground.” No, that’s not what I’m trying to do. I simply read the comments on a fanfiction and got curious if the author’s claims were true. I was open to the possibility that they were, and there turned out to be evidence against it.

All I’m saying is that we should think critically about what’s out there and what we consume —in media, in fandom, and in porn.

Does that really sound so bad?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources I used and would like to thank:  
1\. “Sexual Fantasy” by Christian Joyal https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christian_Joyal/publication/328592847_Sexual_Fantasy/links/5cb7aa2892851c8d22f2d90e/Sexual-Fantasy.pdf  
2\. “26 Reasons Why We Ship Siblings” by Shipcestuous https://x4ashes4ashes.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/22-reasons-why-we-ship-siblings/  
3\. “What’s Up With The Rise of Incest Porn” by Cosmo Frank https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a39382/whats-up-with-the-rise-of-incest-porn/?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1440_173750573  
4\. “Rape Culture” by Marshall University Women’s Center https://www.marshall.edu/wcenter/sexual-assault/rape-culture/  
5\. “Rape Culture, Victim Blaming, and the Role of Media in the Criminal Justice System” by Lily Thacker https://encompass.eku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=kjus  
6\. “Virtual Child Pornography: The Children Aren't Real, But the Dangers Are; Why the Ashcroft Court Got it Wrong” by Brian Goldblatt https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&httpsredir=1&article=1040&context=student_scholarship&source=post_page---------------------------  
7\. “Blocking Child Porn Isn’t About Censorship. It Keeps Kids Safe” by Deirdre Clune and Jillian van Turnhout https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/column-blocking-child-porn-isn’t-about-censorship-it-keeps-children-safe-390656-Mar2012/  
8\. “105 Critical Issues in ‘Fiction vs. Reality’ Fandom” by cat! (I recommend this one especially — it was my most important source and I found most of my other citations through it) https://medium.com/@inkflowe/105-critical-issues-in-fiction-vs-reality-fandom-a6954a4b6f2a  
9\. “You’ve heard of rape culture, but have you heard of pedophile culture?” by Alicen Grey https://www.feministcurrent.com/2015/09/28/youve-heard-of-rape-culture-but-have-you-heard-of-pedophile-culture/ 
> 
> Please don’t comment until you’ve read the “conclusion” section. I’d love to hear your personal experiences (how porn and fiction affect you, why you might ship incest, your thoughts on violence in the media, etc), but if you come here to all angry to defend child porn and say “but fiction DOESN’T affect reality!” (for fuck’s sake, you’re on a fanfiction website, fiction has obviously affected your life), then I will ignore or delete your comment. Because censorship isn’t always bad.


	3. Word Choice In Erotica: Survey Results

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What words do people like to see used in smut? And what might those words have in common? Have a look at the results of this survey I conducted and find out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This essay is different from the other chapters, as it will be more in the style of a scientific article. No opinions, just data. (Okay. Some opinions.)

  
ABSTRACT (aka the short version):

This study examines which words (body part synonyms and other sexual terms) readers prefer to see in erotica, and if there is a correlation between word liking and word explicitness. Participants completed a survey in which they ranked words from one to ten on a scale from “unpleasant” to “pleasant” and “euphemistic” to “pornographic.” The results showed a strong correlation between word liking and explicitness.

The words with the highest average ratings from each section were cock, pussy, cum, breasts, entrance, panties, throbbing, and fuck. Thrust, suck, and lick were also among the highest rated words. 

The lowest rated words in each section were prick, womb, cream, mounds, sphincter, orbs, veiny, and slurp. Manhood, womanhood, juices, and arsehole were also unpopular. 

The data table is a bit further down. The guide to interpreting the chart is in the results section. I encourage you to use these results in your own writing!

THE LONG VERSION:

INTRODUCTION

As users of AO3 and connoisseurs of fanfiction, many of us have had the experience of enjoying ourselves to some smut… but then the author makes a horrible mistake and uses a bad body part euphemism or another gross word that totally kills the mood. In my career, I have seen this happen all too many times. I spend a great deal of my podcast bitching about the words people use, wishing that I could get them to stop using certain terms. “Just say cock!” is a rallying cry on my show. I refuse to say the word “seed” aloud, instead referring to it as “the s-word.” On whole, I have some quite strong opinions about word choice in erotica.

But do other people feel the same? Do they love and hate the same words as I do? After all, if I keep seeing words like “moist” and “manhood,” then some people must enjoy them. 

This is what I set out to research with my survey. I hypothesized that the explicitness and pleasantness of words would be correlated, as I noted that within my own reading that more euphemistic and elaborate descriptors are what most annoy me. As it turns out, many people have similar opinions — and many do not.

  
METHOD

_Participants._ Survey responses were gathered primarily from the subreddit r/Fanfiction, though myself and some friends (at most, ten people) gave responses as well. The survey received 265 responses, but some people did not answer every question. 186 participants were female, 49 were male, 25 were “other,” and five declined to respond. The age of participants was skewed towards a more youthful sample, with 48 teens taking the survey, 156 people in their twenties, 45 in their thirties, 11 in their forties or older, and again, five people who declined to respond. Only 35.4% of participants identified as straight. Most respondents (93.5% who answered the question) read erotica at least a few times a month.

_Design and procedure._ Participants filled out a survey containing a total of 96 items. (Most completed all questions, but none were pressured to do so.) In addition to the four demographic questions, they rated various words that were organized into eight groups: synonyms for the penis, vagina, anus, breasts, semen, other miscellaneous nouns, adjectives, and verbs often used in erotica.

Two scales were used, both from one to ten. On one, participants rated words from 1 (unpleasant or repulsive) to 10 (pleasant or attractive), and from 1 (euphemistic) to (pornographic). If participants found words to be clinical or did not see them in a sexual context, they were instructed to rate them neutrally. (I incorporated this suggestion partway through the survey process, which may have skewed the data for some words).

Participants were also given the option to leave a comment at the end of the survey. Some of my favorites were:

“Bring back ‘cerulean orbs’. But to describe a man with blue balls.”  
— A literary genius

“‘I stuck my engorged prick in her waiting pussy, her juicy cunt wrapping around my pulsating member as she squirted in joy’ is an honest to God sentence I've read before. The person who wrote it needs to be shot.”   
— A saint who has seen some shit

“The words 'moist' and 'panties' just skeeve me out man.”   
— An anon who is so fucking valid

“I WISH I could vote zero for ‘juice’ in reference to cum.”   
— An anon who is absolutely right. Why didn’t I include a zero option.

“Womb is NEVER a synonym for vagina”  
—Another anon who is absolutely right

“:(”   
— A friend to whom I sent this survey

“[Wenchicus Thoticus] why do you want this”   
— Another friend to whom I sent this survey

“get a life and have sex finally!!!!!!! with me please i beg of you [Wenchicus Thoticus]”  
— My boyfriend, who I made take this survey while I watched. I was very disappointed when he rated “panties” a 10 on the pleasantness scale, and needless to say, I am going to continue to withhold sex from him.

RESULTS

A correlational test was done on the data to determine the relationship between word pleasantness and explicitness. I determined the correlation between the averages for each question (N=46), not individual responses, to obtain my final correlation coefficient. The correlation coefficient was r=.69 — there was a strong positive correlation between the two variables — as word liking went up, so did explicitness.

_Figure 1 displays the average pleasantness rating for each word plotted against its average explicitness rating. A line of best fit has been inserted to help display the upward trend (positive correlation)._

I realize that I’ve packed a lot of numbers into the chart below, and some of you may not be the most familiar with statistics. So here is some information on how to read this table.

“SD” is the standard deviation, and it is a measure of how much, on average, the answers deviated from the mean. For instance, higher standard deviation values mean that word was more controversial or polarizing. The word with the most polarizing pleasantness responses was “cunt.”

The mode is the most common rating. In parentheses is the number of people who chose this response out of the 260 or so participants.

The correlation coefficient is a value between -1 and 1. The closer to zero the number, the weaker the correlation. Positive values mean that when one variable increases, so does the other (as pleasantness ratings increase, so does the and explicitness rating), while negative values (only present in the “anus synonyms” section) mean that as pleasantness increases, explicitness decreases. Overall, people preferred more explicit words, except in the “anus” section, in which there was a weak correlation between pleasantness and more euphemistic words.

The section correlations compare the pleasantness and explicitness averages specific to each section — for example, the “penis synonym” section compares the two averages of the word “cock,” the two averages of the word “dick,” and so on down to “prick.” These values are higher in part due to their smaller sample size. 

The other correlations are lower because of their higher sample size (usually N=260, but some respondents did not answer all questions) and compare all individual responses to each question. For example, I compared every pleasantness rating of the word “cock” to every explicitness rating of “cock” to obtain the correlation coefficient of .20. 

The words in each section have been put in order of the highest pleasantness averages to the lowest. All values have been rounded to two decimal places. In spite of all the statistical information I’ve just spewed out, the most important number, in my opinion, is the average pleasantness rating (first column).

  
DISCUSSION

For a variety of reasons, which in most cases come down to personal preferences, the relationship between explicitness and pleasantness was not universal. Some people, in the comment section, reported that pleasantness and explicitness had no relationship for them, that their preference for explicit or euphemistic erotica depended on their mood, or that they always preferred euphemistic erotica. In other cases, sexuality played a factor in answering. For instance, one lesbian respondent rated “cock” a ten on the explicitness scale, but a one for pleasantness.

While in most cases the relationship between the two variables was positive, the “anus synonyms” section saw a slight negative trend, with participants expressing a preference for more euphemistic terms. Perhaps this can be attributed at least in part to the words I chose to include on the survey (in retrospect, I should’ve included just plain old “ass.”) Or maybe while the butt is attractive, there is no pleasant word to refer to the hole itself. After all, it’s where feces come from, and that’s not very sexy. (Or maybe it is to some of you. You kinky fuckers.)

Some people were confused by the euphemistic/pornographic scale. Some words are thought of outside of the context of both porn and euphemism and are instead considered clinical terms (such as penis, vagina, anus, etc). Partway through the survey period, I included the instruction to rank these terms neutrally, but some people left comments telling me that they did this before I added the instruction. This could have influenced the data.

Additionally, I could have labeled more than just the scale anchors (one and ten) in order to better define the meanings of the other numbers. A problem with the usage of scales in statistics is that the difference between two values for one person may be different for another. On whole, the survey could have been better designed, especially in regards to the explicitness scale, and the data may be slightly skewed in some places. Nonetheless, the results from the pleasantness scale and the overall trend of the interrelatedness between explicitness and pleasantness still stand.

Furthermore, there are many, many other words and categories of words that I could have included on this survey. However, I opted not to, considering that the survey was already nearly one hundred items long. I covered most of the main body part euphemisms as well as some words that I continually encounter in my fanfiction journey, and that is a suitable for the goal of the present study. If I were to do a follow-up study, I would include some different words and better define the values on the scales.

It is also important to remember that individual words have connotations beyond their vulgarity, and those connotations vary between different people. While these survey results may reflect general trends in word preference, statistics cannot tell you everything about what you should or should not write. Art is subjective, and what most people might dislike can still appeal to a more niche audience. This information is your friend. Let it guide you, but not control you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who participated. You can find this as a podcast episode (https://wenchicusthoticusthebarislow.bandcamp.com/track/word-choice-in-erotica-survey-results-ep-102), but this is better as written document anyway because you get the sweet ass charts.

**Author's Note:**

> Sources I used and would like to thank:  
“The Sweet Science of Shipping” - Fandom.com  
“Women Who Fetishize Gay Men” - r/GenderCritical  
“In Defense of Mpreg” - paradoxofamaskedman (and the commenters)  
“Friends, Let’s Talk About Omegaverse” - sugaredwhimsey  
Problematic, “Omegaverse and why it’s basically rape culture” - Evanaissante
> 
> Thanks for reading. I welcome discussion and comments, but if all you’re going to say is “blah blah blah you generalized” then just don’t bother. Because I already know that I generalized. Before you comment, make sure you didn’t miss the point. I had that happen to a few people last time. If I overlooked something (for example, I didn’t consider how age affects all of this until one of the commenters on the last version brought it up), feel free to let me know. Let’s keep things civilized, please.
> 
> You can find this essay in audio form on iTunes, Blubrry, Castbox, Spotify, and podcasts.com. My show is called The Bar Is Low and usually it’s about way less sophisticated stuff than this, like weird porn. Supposedly, it’s a comedy podcast, so if that piques your interest, I’d much appreciate it if you checked it out.


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